


Breadcrumbs

by lonelywalker



Category: Those Who Kill (US TV)
Genre: Adultery, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Spoilers up to episode 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 02:33:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1452274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Catherine and Thomas need a way to break out of the boxes other people keep trapping them in. Beer and a booty call might be a start.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breadcrumbs

_When you get a text from me, it’s a one-time deal. You blow it, you blow it._

It’s Monday. His knuckles have been sliced through by springs and ratchets, and he can sense that, somewhere out there, a radio is still playing the Mamas & the Papas. Maybe Cyndi Lauper if he’s lucky. He surveys his class, or what remains of it. No, no, no. It’s a Boomtown Rats day for sure.

His phone buzzes against his thigh just as he begins to explore the theory of compulsion. He can’t read the message until the class ends, but it’s an apt coincidence either way. Murder or something more, it’ll lead him down a path he should never have taken.

She has a beer ready for him at the door, although it’s only early evening. She might have been here for hours, an afternoon off courtesy of Bisgaard. She glances at his knuckles and says nothing, just the way he says nothing about the neat rows of white scars he knows he’ll find at her hip, low on her belly. 

The apartment’s been cleaned up since he was last here. He won’t be so lucky when he returns to his office. Even if Benedicte discovers the wreckage, she’ll leave it there as evidence to back up her latest attempted intervention. She cares about him; she means well. But he can’t go home yet.

“Did you like when I picked you up?” Catherine asks.

 _Picked you up_. There’s so much of interest within the semantics of ordinary conversation. “I was impressed. Although I shouldn’t have been.”

“You were hard.”

He smiles, shrugs it off. “That was just my zipper. And they’re new jeans. The fly’s still stiff.”

They’re out on her balcony, the night air just chill enough through his sweater. The beer tastes of nothing, and the railing – given what they’d both witnessed yesterday – seems frighteningly insubstantial.

Catherine touches her cigarette to her lips. “Did you come in your pants, lying on top of the coffin like that? Or did you leave it till later?”

“I didn’t… It wasn’t like that.”

“Later, then. You got on top of your wife and thought about _her_ in the box.”

He doesn’t have a cool enough head for this sort of thing. For anything even mildly related to Catherine Jensen’s life and fears and line of work. She’s dispassionate, or good at faking it. He… the only time he can feel like that is when he’s in someone else’s head.

Taking another swig of beer seems like the only option, other than screaming at her and charging out, so he does that. “I didn’t think about either of you in the box,” he says finally, once he’s swallowed and taken a breath. “I thought about _me_ being in the box.”

“Who the fuck does that?” Barely any change in intonation. “Believe me, Thomas, it’s not something you want to think about.”

He studies that unlit cigarette and then, because he must, her eyes. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s ever been trapped in one before?”

***

There are handcuffs on the stand by her bed. He can see them just out of the corner of his eye, a sort of reassurance for her, and for him too. He wonders where she keeps those off-the-books guns she surely has somewhere. Not under her pillows: his head had hit them far too hard to miss that.

“You knocked up your wife,” Catherine says. 

So they’re at that point. He’s already let her strip off his sweater and the t-shirt beneath. That she had wanted to at all was a good sign. She’d had a hand on that stiff zipper of his out on the balcony, as though he might bend her over a table and fuck her with his jeans on. But somehow they’d ended up here, his skin bare against her sheets as he’s the one to push down his jeans and underwear. No bullshitting about being hard now.

“Twice,” he says.

She nods, unhooking her bra. “I have… some issues about fathers.”

He can’t judge her humor well enough yet, so he pushes back his hair instead of smiling. “About parents in general.”

“Who doesn’t, right?” The condom packet lands coldly at the base of his cock. “Put it on.”

She does this a lot, knowledge and guesswork tell him, but it might not be completely egotistical to think this time is a little different. He knows her name. They work together. She’s met his wife…

Maybe a quickie over the table would have been better. There was no chance of _that_ being misinterpreted as something more than the release of tension. By either one of them. This, as she rubs against him and he pushes into her, could be something dangerously like intimacy.

More than a few students – male and female – have propositioned him over the years, and though he’s never taken any of them up on the offer, this feels the way he imagines those might have felt. It feels like a test he’s doomed to fail. That he’s already failing.

He stretches out his arms, grabbing at the soft edges of the mattress, because touching her – her hair, her breasts, her hips – seems like it might be too aggressive, even with her on top, even with her having initiated the whole thing. Her hands close over his biceps and she leans forward, weight on his bones. Moving, moving, always moving. At long last he lets himself think about that rather than anything else, about himself inside her, about the rocking of their bodies, about the tightness and fullness and relentlessness of it all.

She smiles when his breaths become faster, harder, when he groans and curses and thrusts up, fucking her too, needing as much as she can give him.

“Oh God, please. Please.” How long since he last begged? “I just…”

His hands are white-knuckled in their grip when she grabs one, bruising grazed skin, and moves it between them, shows him where. 

Feeling her come, coming in her, feels sweeter than it should, more a natural roll into pleasure than a quick, violent spurt. It’s not so unlike the warm, comfortable conclusion to domestic lovemaking that now would continue with blankets and snuggling and sleep. 

He realizes, watching her sit back and study him, that he might not bolt if Catherine wanted the same. But he’d spend all night with his eyes open, and probably so would she.

“You should get back.”

“Yeah, I should.” He’s still inside her. Or he is for a moment before she steps off, picking up her shirt from the floor. He sits up, rolls off the condom, tosses it in the trash. 

She tells him he can have a shower, offers him coffee, but he only dresses and checks his hair in the mirror. Catherine proclaims it “artfully mussed.” 

“I’ll text you,” she says at the door.

“I thought this was a one-time deal.”

She sips on her coffee, amused. “I meant I’ll let you know about the next mindfuck of a case I get assigned, but sure. The other thing too.”

He half-turns to go, ends up leaning against the doorframe instead. “You remember that class of mine you interrupted?”

“Sure. Comfort food and breadcrumbs.”

“Breadcrumbs, right. When you get into our line of work, you have to sprinkle a few. A few real things you can believe in that’ll always lead you back out of the catacombs again.”

Her raised eyebrows tell him this is probably one tortured metaphor too many. “Are you trying to say I’m a breadcrumb?”

“You’re probably a loaf.” He pauses, winces. “That didn’t come out especially well. Maybe a baguette? Brioche?”

Catherine reaches past him and twists the lock. “Drive safe, Professor.”

He’d like to think that she stands there with her coffee, watching until the elevator comes. But the door closes, the lock turns. 

Thomas turns his back on her apartment and waits, one hand still on the phone that rests against his thigh.


End file.
